Resolving a Star Wars Skirmish

Addressing the annual meeting of legislators from the NATO nations in San Francisco last week, Secretary of State George Shultz emphasized that the U.S. plans no change in its Star Wars testing program. So what else is new? Just this: before Shultz could make that statement, Ronald Reagan had to settle a bitter dispute among his senior advisers.The dustup briefly threatened to scuttle the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

Earlier this month National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane astonished many arms-control experts by announcing on NBC's Meet the Press that wide-open testing and even development of the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative, as Star Wars is formally named, is "approved and authorized" by the ABM treaty. "Only deployment (of SDI) is foreclosed," McFarlane claimed. This was an abrupt reversal of U.S. policy. Previously, everyone had assumed that Article V of the treaty meant what it said: the U.S. and the Soviet Union were committed "not to develop, test or deploy ABM systems or components." The Pentagon accordingly made tortuous refinements in its program to stay in compliance. Some Star Wars equipment, for example, had been described as a new type of device: "subcomponents," a word not used in the treaty.

McFarlane's new interpretation is said to have originated with Pentagon hard-liners, including Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. They argued that the ABM limitations do not apply to new technology. In 1972, the only operational missile-killing systems consisted of interceptor missiles fired from fixed ground sites. Negotiators attached to the treaty a rider known as Agreed Statement D, specifying that any new forms of ABM defense "would be subject to discussion." In the Pentagon reading, that clause exempted "exotic" systems, such as laser and particle beams, from the prohibitions of the pact. "Crazy," replied John Rhinelander, former legal counsel to the U.S. negotiating team; he and Chief Negotiator Gerard Smith insisted that the provision had been drafted specifically to guarantee that the treaty would apply to exotic systems. Nonetheless, an Administration official told reporters that the new interpretation had become "fixed" policy.

Not quite. While legal experts in the State, Defense and Justice Departments had accepted the Pentagon interpretation even before McFarlane spoke, U.S. diplomats and NATO allies were appalled. They protested that the Administration position, coming only weeks before next month's Geneva summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, would doom any chance for negotiating an arms-control agreement. Shultz suggested to the White House that if McFarlane was making policy for so sensitive a matter on television, then Reagan would seem to have no need for a Secretary of State.

Reagan convened a White House meeting of Shultz, McFarlane, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman that was described by Administration sources as "acrimonious." The President signed a National Security Decision Directive embodying a compromise of sorts: the Administration would not repudiate the new interpretation of the treaty but would not act on it either. In his San Francisco speech and in subsequent remarks to NATO Foreign Ministers in Brussels, Shultz proclaimed the issue to be "moot." A broad interpretation "is fully justified," said the Secretary in San Francisco. But SDI testing would "be conducted in accordance with a restrictive interpretation."

Again, not quite; the present testing program at best stretches the letter of the treaty to the limit. Though the Soviets officially kept quiet throughout the latest fuss, it was only last week they conceded, in the arms- control talks at Geneva, that some SDI laboratory research would be acceptable. The U.S. contends the Soviets have broken the treaty by building a ! big radar installation near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Thus Reagan and Gorbachev will have quite enough opportunity to argue about ABM adherence. The last thing they needed was another explosive interpretation to dispute.